Free Laugh Till You Cry by Joan Lowery Nixon Page B

opened them and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m not sure where Hayden was.”
    “Do you see how silly it is to blame Hayden for everything?” she asked. “It wasn’t you, but it’s not Hayden.”
    Jake didn’t give Cody a chance to answer. “Keep thinking about what you heard and saw,” he said. “Something might occur to you.”
    “What can you do with a two-pound bag of powdered sugar?” Cody asked.
    Jake smiled. “I give up. What?”
    “No, this is not a joke. I really need to know.”
    Jake cocked his head and studied Cody. “Why?”
    Cody quickly glanced at his mother. After what she had said, there was no way he could bring up Hayden.
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. I was just wondering.”
    Jake said, “First of all, you can cook with it.”
    “That’s what I told him,” Mrs. Carter said.
    “And it’s possible to …” Jake stopped, thought a moment, and got to his feet. “I’ll have to think on it a minute.” Then, as if he were deliberately changing the subject, he said, “By the way, you might like to know that I got a spot on the open-mike schedule at the club for tomorrow night. I’ve worked out a routine about Texas, and I’m using the joke about Texas I bought from you. The musicians in my group actually laughed at it, so I’m hoping the audience will, too. There’s nothing rougher to face than a dead audience. Every stand-up comic hopes and prays that the audience will be with him.”
    “What if it isn’t?”
    “Then you work to win it over. It’s sort of like what an attorney has to do to win over a jury.”
    “Could I go to the club and hear you?” Cody asked.
    Jake shook his head. “I wish you could. I know I can count on you to laugh at my jokes. But you’re too young to go to a club, Cody. I’ll have to tell you all about it. Or Ms. Jackson can tell you. She told me she’d be there. Just cross your fingers for me that the audience will think I’m funny.”
    “What’ll you do if they don’t?” Cody asked.
    “What other stand-ups do when the people in an audience sit on their hands—pretend that they’re laughing and applauding, and keep going, giving it the best I can.”
    As Cody and his mother walked to the front door with Jake, the officer said, “Wish me luck.”
    “We will,” Cody said, but he thought,
Somebody had better wish me luck, too. If we don’t find out who made those calls to the school, I’m really going to need it.

CHAPTER TEN
    Friday morning, right after breakfast, Cody opened his top dresser drawer and reached inside to get his
Hamlet
report. As he stared inside the drawer, filled with nothing but rolled-up socks, he felt his mouth drop open in shock. The report he had put in the drawer for safekeeping wasn’t there.
    He tugged open the other drawers, slamming them as he saw they didn’t hold his report, either. “Mom!” he wailed.
    His mother, who had come upstairs at the same time he had, appeared in an instant. The clean sheets she had taken from the linen closet were piled in her hands. “What in the world is the matter?” she asked.
    “My
Hamlet
report!” Cody answered. “It was right here in the top drawer, and now it’s gone!”
    “It has to be somewhere,” she said. “Can you remember where you put it?”
    “I know where I put it!” Cody said. He glanced at the clock. In less than twenty minutes he’d have to leave for school. Where was his report?
    He and his mother searched the room, even checking under the bed. The paper he had so painstakingly written was nowhere in sight.
    Cody dropped onto his bed as a horrible thought hit him. “Mom,” he said, “when Hayden, Brad, and Eddie were here yesterday afternoon, did you let any of them come up here into my room?”
    “Honey, I was working in the kitchen, cutting up carrots and potatoes for the stew. I didn’t check to see where the boys were.”
    “They took my report.”
    “I thought we’d settled this suspicion you have about Hayden. Why do